User Reviews

The fifth chapter of CAPTAINS AND THE KINGS introduces Perry King as Joseph Armagh's eldest son Rory, being groomed to become the first Irish American President of the United States, if he can survive the violent hazing he receives in college, simply because he's Irish. Joseph's long suffering wife Bernadette (Patty Duke) finally learns that her own stepmother, Elizabeth Hennessey (Blair Brown), is the woman having a discreet affair with her husband, confronting her with knowledge that the child she bore was actually fathered by Tom Hennessey years before he wed her, Bernadette reduced to tears to find that Joseph is already aware of all the facts (this may be the one episode that helped earn Patty a well deserved Emmy for her heart wrenching performance). By far the standout sequence features the legendary Henry Fonda as upstanding senator Enfield Bassett, whose bill to protect alien rights is opposed by the fearsome Joseph Armagh, resorting to blackmail to squash it with his knowledge of Bassett's mulatto grandmother born a slave; the senator's subsequent suicide, and the curse he places on Armagh, will haunt him for the rest of his life.